How Cameo Cashed in on Celebrity Videos

from the previous year. It's coming up today on Strictly Business. Stay tuned, Welcome back to Strictly Business. Here's Cameo CEO Stephen galanis so seven maybe you can start, uh, just tell us sing your own words. What what is Cameo? What's what's the mission? The mission of Cameo is to create the most personalized and authentic fan connections on Earth today. We primarily do this by selling personalized video shoutouts from

tens of thousands of different athletes, actors or celebrities. And that's not the That's not the end of the business model, right, we hope it's just the beginning. We believe we're in the top of the second ending with cameo and the larger vision of cameos to build the marketplace for people's time for x amount of money you as a fan should be able to pay to do. Why activity was

the person that you love? And UM right now we're focused primarily on one y activity, the personalized video shout out, the core cameo, which you know, I think we become synonymous with. But again, this is just the first of many things that we hope to delight fans with. Okay, we'll get some more of that later, I think. But so far to date you've delivered how many cameos to date, it's a it's more than a million now. I think

we've done one point six million now since we started. UM. You know, last year we crossed the millionth mark at the beginning of the summer, which was a really exciting milestone for the company and UH and we ended up doing one point three million just in which was four times more than we've ever done in a year. So most cameos that have ever been done have happened in the last twelve months. UM, and we're excited to just continue to accelerate and create more magical moments for fans

around the world. So what what made you hit the hockey stick? Was it the coronavirus pandemic really gave you guys a lift? Or what happened? Cameo was the fastest growing consumer marketplace on Earth coming into so the business had been growing very rapidly. Um. But again, you know, I think very relevant to your listeners. I don't have to tell any of them that all live sports, all live entertainment, all live music shut down for a big part of and um, you know, artists were suddenly finding

themselves without any of their normal income streams. They're missing the hell out of their fans. And you know, a CAMEO we provided, UH during a really tough time for them, an opportunity for talent to connect with the people that keep them going, their their die hard fans and UH and and make money at a time where nothing was

coming in. And if you think about, you know, or or prior to the number one and number two reasons that talent wouldn't join Cameo were you know, I'm making too much money doing everything else that I do, or I don't have time. So in a year where people suddenly weren't making money, and they had more time than ever. They gave us a shot. And the thing that's been really awesome to see is, you know, everything's come back

really at this point except for live music. You know, movies are filming again, televisions filming again, sports, you know, the super Bowl just happened, so everybody's back to work. And the thing that was really cool to see is that they came on. They gave us a shop during a time where nothing else was going on. But now that life has returned to normal, cameos and interacting with their fans this way has become part of their their stack as creators. It's it's become just as important to

them as their Instagram, their Twitter. There there anything else well for for some of them. I mean, I mean it takes a special kind of or a special kind of interest in this, right, I mean to open up to two individual fans like that. I mean, there are some people who are unwilling to do this. I'm assuming there's some people unwilling to be on Instagram or Twitter, right, So there are people that don't like interacting with their fans. We haven't found black market for those people in general.

One of the things that I've learned in the last four years is that talent, no matter if they're musicians or actors or athletes, are primarily driven by three main things. Uh, they want to make more money, they want to become more famous, and they want to become more beloved. So money, fame,

love is a framework that we think about. And yeah, you're right if you're If you're somebody who doesn't need more fame or doesn't need more money, or doesn't need more love, Kenyo is not a great place for you, and that's fine, um, But fortunately for us, most people in the entertainment industry are looking to increase all three

of those things. And you know, the core value prop for cameo is that in cameo, we're paying the talent to become more famous and more beloved, and we helped them turn their casual fans into super fans by creating magical moments for them. So what is the price range of an individual cameo and who sets that pricing? Is that a negotiation with the talent. The talent have always controlled their price. Is always important to us that nobody

ever felt that this wasn't worth their time. So by definition, if they're setting their own price, like they're saying that this is worth my time. As we've matured as a business, we've been able to use our proprietary data to show, you know, talent at different price points. Here's how you're

converting at fifty dollars versus seventy five vere. Here's how you're you're doing in comparison to other people who are similar, maybe other characters on the same show, or you know, if you're the star quarterback in one city, here's how the star quarterbacks in another city is doing. So in many ways, like our marketplace is starting to mature, and it's it's almost becoming like a zillo, right, It's almost becoming a place where people are coming on and looking

for relative value. So they'll they'll they'll look for a group of people and they'll find the one that they perceive has the best value as opposed to you're just going for one person. So like I'm worth more in Lindsay Lohan or something, a really good example. I'm a I'm a die hard Chicago Bears fan and two of my favorite all time Bears players or Lance Spriggs and Brian or Lacker, they were almost equal players. They're both you know, star star linebackers for the Bears one War

number fifty five, one War War number fifty four. Lance Spriggs is fifty five dollars. Brian or Lacker is five dollars. You must really love Brian er Lacker to justify thing ten x uh, you know, for his for his rate. But but that just gives you a sense of of how our consumers shop and what the psychology is behind it. Interesting. Okay, So this range is from maybe five to ten bucks for some people, all the way up to couple of

thousand or what is the range exactly? Yeah, the at the low and people are free, I mean there there are some people on cameo that are zero dollars um. At the high end, the most expensive can be you know, multiple thousands of dollars um. Today, the average price of cameos is seventy dollars. So it's actually a lot more affordable than most people would expect. And that's and that increased last year by about I think yeah, And and frankly, we've seen it increase, you know, year over year by

a similar range. Since we started in seventeen, which is our first year in business. The average price was twenty bucks, it was forty bucks and eighteen, it was sixty bucks in nineteen and you know, in an increase to seventy bucks last year. Part of it, again, this was a completely new marketplace, so nobody knew what something like this

should cost. When we launched, we were selling videos for one dollar or two dollars, three dollars, and at that price, people are saying, this was the best dollar I've I've ever spent, and this was the best two dollars I've ever spent. And then as you know, Cameo has become you know, more widely known, and you know, more talent er on it of a higher caliber that the price has naturally gone up because consumers understand what they're getting and have a good idea of what the value is.

Fees to be some other things that they could get from talent. Okay, so how do you look at the competitive landscape here, Stephen? I mean, there's nobody that quite does what you do. But I mean, are you competing with you know, Twitter, Instagram? Are you competing with only fans? I'm kind of joking about that, but how do you see other people responding to you know, your audio marketplace.

One of the things that um I've been thinking a lot about over the past four years is this widening gap that's happening in all forms of the entertainment world between fame and monetization. So today there are more famous people on Earth now than there ever had been because of social media, because Netflix is putting twenty billion dollars in content a year. And you know, if we had had this interview a week a year ago, none of us would have known who Carol Baskin is andresotic and

now you know, everyone on Earth knows who they are. Right. There's Carol bask and was like the sixth most popular talent on Cameo last year, right, Right, So again we have tens of thousands of talent and a year ago nobody knew who she was, and today you know, she's a top ten person in the world on Cameo. Right. So the whole point is that the amount of fame on Earth is exponentially increasing, but the business model supporting

fame is growing linearly. So what's happening is for the average talent, there's a widening gap between fame and monetization, and the underlying business models are only working for the top like you know, point zero zero one percent, you know, the true A plus listers. So if you look at YouTube, the top three percent of creators make percent of all

the ad revenue. There's people with tens of millions of followers who you know, your kids love or your nephews love that, uh that you know you've never heard of, but like, they make no money on YouTube. Essentially they have to monetize otherwise. Uh. If you're talking about sports, the top two percent athletes make of all the endorsement the new And there was a documentary ESPN did a couple of years called Broke that said of NFL players

go broke five years after playing their last game. For Spotify, the top one percent of artists make of all the streaming revenues. So artists are having to sell merch, they're having to do meeting greets when they're touring, they're having to go on tour um and you know, in in the Screen Actors Guild in the best of times, one of the oldest memes of Hollywood is the outer work actress or actor who's bartending or waiting tables between getting

casted in something. But those people can now go on YouTube, they can go on TikTok, and you know, those that have great talent can actually go and find ways to blow up without being cast in anything. So when you're looking at this, there's now fifty million people on Earth who consider themselves creators and the pipeline is big. One third of American teens hope to be an influencer when

they grow up. So there's continued stress on this. And when you look at the legacy business models and music and entertainment, the solution here is not coming from the record labels. It's not coming from the movie studios. Everybody

is under siege. You think about sports um, you know ESPN struggling because people are cutting cable and when you when you think about all these things, the only solution to fixing this long term, a world where there's more famous people, people are more famous than they are rich, is by going direct to fan for monetization. So I think Cameo is the leader in direct to fan monetization. Uh, this space is white hot, it's a huge space. There will be many big companies Cameo included, that are built

out of this um. And you know, you you talked about business like only fans that's helping go direct to fan monetization for the adult sector. Uh, there's businesses like Patreon who are doing direct to fan monetization for artists

and podcasters. Sub Stack is doing this for journalists. Right, So there's a variety of companies in this space and it's extreme, really interesting and we've never looked at Twitter or Instagram or snapchatter or clubhouse or anything is competitive because ultimately talent get famous on those platforms and it's on Cameo that they come to get paid to become more famous and more beloved. So in many ways, the

other platforms are the farm system for Cameo. And you know we you know we benefit from a system where more people, more famous people are being created every day. So what share? What is the revenue share that you provide with the talent? Does it depend? Is it arrange? Every single talent is on the exact same financial split. It's a split talents way. Um, every person is on

the same deal. We've never deviated for anybody. Um, we've never given a minimum guarantee, we've never paid anyone to come on Cameo, and we've never given equity for anyone to join the platform. So everyone's on the same deal. And we think that's uh, that was a huge part

of building a fair ubiquitous platform. Oah uh, So let's talk about who are the successful people on cameo really making making a mid here, you know, and I've got the top ten list of top performing talent of number one Brian Brian bowmen Garten, sorry, Brian bowen Gardner, who was Kevin from the Office, right, Yeah, then you've bred Farve, uh Snoop Doug, Gilbert Gottfried, Chris Harrison of The Bachelor, um, and the aforementioned Carol Baskin from Tiger King. What's common

among the people who perform really well? Besides you know, they're hard working and put in put in the elbow grease. Here. The the thing that characterizes talent who are really successful on cameo, I think is a couple of things. Number One,

they have to have a big, authentic personality. So if you're looking at someone like uh, you know, Big Ed from ninety Day Fiance, who is one of the top ten cameo talent this year, or um, someone like Gilbert God for your Snoop dog like, these are big personalities who um you know, tend to be really funny. We find that people that are funny tend to be the

best people who are great at ad living um. And the thing that's interesting, if you look at our top ten most you know booked people on cameo, it is not a representation of the top ten most famous people on cameo. So it's interesting. Just like Snapchat, you know, made DJ Khalid kind of this huge star, but you know, he's not the biggest person in the world on Instagram or on Instagram. You know, Kylie Jenner and and Kim Kardashian are like the biggest people on earth, but they're

not the biggest people on Twitter. That was Ashton Kutcher and shocked back in the day. Every platform has their stars that are become emerge and breakout stars. They're all famous, but it takes something special, uh, you know, for them and and and for us, it's people who are authentic, people who really love their fans, people who make pretty funny videos. That that's that tends to be what we

found makes people most successful in CanYa. Okay, so you probably have some whales that you'd like to get here, right, Like, I mean, Taylor Swift, I don't know um, Frank Ocean people like that. Right, There are five million people on Earth we think can be on this, and we have tens of thousands, so you know, we we could spend like the entire UH podcast talking about all the people we want to get on Cameo, and it's really not even that we want them. We want to make our

fans happy. So we know every day who people are searching for, and our team, you know, has been working hard over the last four years to take a look at the aggregate search results and get people on that UM that the fans are demanding. And that's that's that's why we exist to to do, you know, to get these people on the platform so we can make people smile,

laugh and cry. We need to take a quick break, but we'll have more with Stephen right after this, and we're back with CAMEO CEO Stephen Glennis, let's back up a second. Let's go back if if you will, Stephen and give us kind of the short version of the origin story. How did this start? So? UM? My co founder Martin Uh, someone I've known for a while. We were producing movies and television shows together and UH and then I went to go work at LinkedIn um he went to go and be an NFL agent. We didn't

see each other for a couple of years. He then flew into Chicago for my grandmother's funeral, and as I was driving him back to the airport, he was telling me about a problem he was having as an NFL agent who was wrapping one person who was in a superstar the player his name was Cassius Marsha the Seattle Seahawks. Martin had high conviction because the guy had a big personality, that maybe this guy could become the next rock, you know, Let's get him in television shows, Let's get him in movies,

Let's get him endorsement deals. And I had never heard of him, and I asked Martin, like, show me who he is. And he pulled out his phone and he played a video that today we called the first Cameo. And in the video, Martin had Cassius marsh congratulate his good buddy Brandon, who at the time was working at Nike with a lot of big famous athletes, but loves the Seattle Seahawks. And he congratulated Brandon. I'm becoming a father, so he hits play. Cassius is not wearing a shirt.

He's in southern California. He's all tatted up, he's got a flat brimmed tat on and he's making the video while driving and he goes, you know, he goes, hey, Brandon, it's Cassius marsh from the Seahawks. Heard about your son, Maverick. Congratulations. If he gets your athletic ability, he'll be playing for

the Seahawks one day. Go Hawks. It was like a five you know, I have six second video, but it was so striking and immediately as he showed it to me, the lightbulb moment, you know, hit and and I was like, Martin, we need we need to sell that, Like I feel like people would want that. So immediately we had pretty high conviction that people would want this if talent were willing to do them at scale. And that was the

big question. And as we started to talk to you know, pro athletes we knew, or actors we knew, we kept hearing that like, oh, yeah, I did one of these for my agents. You know son's bar Mitzvah right, or uh, you know I did one of these for to pump up my the football team in my old high school. So we are for people who were kind of in

the inner circle. And we really felt like if we created a marketplace that was lifting the red velvet rope and and bringing people in, talent would be able to engage with way more of their fans than they do today. Because you know, in many worlds, like in this world of social uh, everyone wants to engage with their fans more, but you know, it can be really dangerous letting you know, people into closely. So this gave talent the opportunity to come and, you know, and delight their fans on their

own schedule. And for the fans side, I mean, you've seen many famous people, I'm sure with your job, and how often are you in a restaurant and you see someone you really admire and you're like nervous to go up to them, right and and if you do, they might be mean to you. So like this actually or or when you do talk to them, a lot of

times people get starstruck, they fumble their words. So this actually, on the fans side, is a more safe and enjoyable way to interact with the talent because that nervous factors out as well. So we just found it worked really well on both sides. That's an interesting psychological sort of human nature porn. UM. I have to ask you this, right. You recently had a story Lindsay Lohan asked UH, a fan who had ordered a video from her to take it down, UM from social media? How does that happen?

And UM, you know, is this just a UM, you know, an attribute of UM you know, people getting used to this whole concept or I mean again, we've done one point six million cameos since we started. I don't I don't even think I could count on one hand the amount of times that we've you know, we've seen that typically it's not because the video is inappropriate, like in this case, it wasn't. UM. I I believe in this case, Lindsay was giving this this girl motivation to come out

to her parents. UM. And you know, then she made a TikTok compilation of it, and you know, and it went viral. It was a great moment. And I'm sure in Lindsay's mind this was something that was probably like best for the person that it was intended to, and and and people in the immediate factor. But you know, it went on TikTok, it went hyper viral, which look percent of the time, like the talent love when the videos go viral, UM, and and the fans love it too.

So this was just a case where I think she felt this was like a very personal moment and UM and it went out. But this has not been a problem at any type of scale for us. Okay, UM, now you you mentioned, uh were you alluded to some newer products that are coming in. You've got something called Cameo Direct let's you chat directly with UM your favorite celebrity. UM. And you've got Cameo Live, which is like a fifteen

minute zoom call. What what's been the traction there and what do you need UM to do on that front too to get that into you know, the mainstream product pipeline. Yeah, so both of these were new products that we launched

last year. UM. You know, messaging is something that we think is really important to the future of Cameo when you look at other social networks, whether it's Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn, where I used to work, UM, you know, in mail with such a big part of LinkedIn, So in many ways, UH, Cameo Director is kind of like in mail for celebrities, you can shoot a direct message

to them and on Instagram or Twitter. Um, you know, I'm sure you get a lot of d MS yourself, and if you don't follow the person, it goes into a different box than a lot of times you don't even see those d M s. The cool thing about Cameo d M is that you know, you can pay and get into their inbox and they actually see it. So in many ways, this is taking a concept that we learned that payment is a necessary friction which enables fulfillment, and we've just taken it to the next level in

the d M experience on Cameo Live. This was you know, as I mentioned at the beginning, we're building the marketplace where for X amount of money you can do why activity was the person This was the second why activity that we I thought was interesting. People have always asked me, Stephen, are one day will I be able to meet the stars in real life? Like would you ever do you know? Real life bookings. It's something we've thought about from the beginning,

but it's logistically difficult because of COVID. Everybody's using Zoom. I think zooms daily active users went from like ten million to million basically overnight. And you know, I know, if I had told my mom, you know, to get on a Zoom call. Uh, twelve months ago, she would have known what I was talking about. But now today it's become so easy. But and it's the same for talent to write, like a lot of talent had never

been on zoom. Uh. They started doing it, and they found that this was a great way to interact with their fans. It allowed us to test out synchronous video chat for the first time and uh, and we took a lot of learnings there and you know, now we're starting to think about different formats for synchronous So that was a big experiment. People enjoyed it a lot. And at this point, we're taking the learnings that we made from doing it in a low code way over Zoom

and we're actually building it into the core product. So you know, I would I would really watch our Cando Calls product, which would be coming out later this year. Yeah. And as opposed to in person meet and greets, Uh, it's a lot more scalable, right, and it um, you know, more cost efficient. Yeah. I'll tell you a story. Um. One of my early mentors is a guy named Matt Maloney,

who is the CEO of grub Hub. And one thing Matt told me in the early days of Cameo was, Stephen, I built the largest marketplace business that's ever come out of Chicago, my hometown, his hometown. Uh. And you you've built a business that has the opportunity to be way bigger than the one that I built. Because you're selling bits. I'm selling atoms. Now what does that mean? Nobody in Chicago cares about how many restaurants are in on grub hub in l A because you need to build localized

supply and match with localized demand. But on Cameo, a talent could be in Mumbai and make and make a video for someone in Miami. And because we've removed location is a barrier, the amount of connections that we're able to facilitate every day has gone up drastically. UM. So that's why I think, like, well, in person meetups would be really cool that anything synchronous video is way more scalable because don't actually have to think about the logistics

of where people are. Yeah, or as you mentioned before, security issues, UM, things like that. UM. One other new area of business that you recently did. UM, you did your first partnership with a movie studio. You worked with MGMs American International Pictures and a collaboration for breaking news in Yuberg County. Um, and so what how did this

come together? And so essentially correct me if I'm wrong here, but Alison Janny and Bridget Everett are giving special Valentine's Day messages for ten bucks each and the proceeds are benefiting the Trevor Project and COVID nineteen relief. Um, how did this come about? And where do you see this type of thing going? Yeah, it's an every one. We're

really excited about it. For the last three years, we've had numerous studios come to us to talk about, Hey, here's a way that we think we can work with Canyo too, you know, build fomo and excitement around to launch. UM. You know, for a long time we found ourselves getting in these conversations and then nothing would end up happening. But I think that from the studio's perspective, movie theaters

are still closed. Uh, you're you're You're having a lot of these films released direct to consumer now, and everybody's looking for ways to to um, you know, to stand out from the crowd and the advertising budgets of of all the main studios have been cut in a big way. I mean, you know, at the Super Bowl, one thing that stood out. I don't think I saw a single preview for a movie that was coming out, which like that's probably a third of the commercials out of normal

Super Bowl. And there were there were a couple, but yeah, not a lot. But I'm saying like pales in comparison to what you know, we normally would see. So from from that side, UM, this was a thing that materialized through hardware gone MGM side and on our partnership side, we're really excited to test this and so far the results have been really exciting on both sides. UM, and you know, hopefully this is something we do more over

and over again. I think it's I think in two years or a year from now, every single movie, every show coming out, we'll have a camera strategy. This is you know, in many ways, we're piloting it out and we're grateful that MGM gave us the opportunity to to help be part of such an exciting new project. Yeah interesting, Okay, Uh, just a couple other things while we while we have ton, you brought on a whole bunch of new senior executives. UM. In the last couple of months, UM Rob Post who

was previously at Quimby. UM he was CTO there, he's now your CTO. UM. You have a CFO dep Swarts who was with Bustle previously. UM melst Einbach who was previously at McDonald's. She's your chief people officer. And your CEO Brian Frank who you do I think from Lincoln what UM? I mean this is this is the next stage of the company. Then building out that that c

suite for you absolutely, UM. Like our our goal is to become one of the most important companies in entertainment and we think that we're building something great that will be an enduring, last thing publicly traded company. And you know, the next phase for Cameo was finding people who have been there, done that. UM. We're all first time founders and most of the founding executive team. Every single day we hired more people that everyone was in the biggest

job they've ever had. UM. We've you know, in dead we found a CFO that can take a public at in mal we have UM a chief people officer who's operated at one of the largest employers in the world. Um in our CEO, Brian Frank We've found someone uh join LinkedIn as the second person in revenue when they're doing seventy million in business and was there until they were doing six billion and sold to Microsoft. And in

rob Post. We think we have one of the best uh you know, technologists in the world helping lead our our efforts to just build an incredible platform. So we love the new leaders that we've had. Uh They've messed seamlessly so far with the existing people that have been the reason why we've gotten there, and they've been additive to our culture. So we're excited on that. It's my job to make sure the CEO that I'm the worst

person in the executive room. So I'm trying to, you know, surround myself with people that I can learn from and that know their subject area way better than I do. And that's really the way that I CEO can continue to grow quicker than the pace of the business, which has been really fast. Now now or is your company still working remotely given pandemic conditions, Not only are we working remotely today, but we will be working remotely forever. We actually made the decision this summer to become a

fully distributed company. Historically, we were headquartered in Chicago with our hey, we had people in London, with people in Melbourne, Australia. We have people in Argentina. Uh. Since mid June, we've decided that we're gonna get rid of all of our offices. We do not care where people live anymore, as long as they have internet access. And and you know, this is an exciting new face for us. Those executives that you just mentioned, they're not in l A and Chicago.

Rob posts in Tampa Bay Depth Shorts is in New York City. Uh, the Bran Frank is in the Bay Area. So you know, it's allowed us to hunt and find the best people no matter where they are. And in fact, today twenty six are are are are employees living states. So this is a huge difference from before everyone was in Illinois California. Uh. You mentioned um in I P have you have a time learn on that? Look, we um, that's our goal, right. I think like as a as a CEO, it's my job at some point to exit

the business, either through I P O or acquisition. Um. You know that's my number one fiduciary responsibility to my employees to the talent on the platform to all the people who invested in US and had faith in us. UM. So you know, for me, that's been a dream, a lifelong dream to run a publicly traded company. We'll do when we're ready. We're not going to do it before we're ready. Um. And and I think, um, you know, we have a very ambitious roadmap. We've got a lot

of things to accomplish before we're ready for it. Uh. And frankly, a lot of team building right the infrastructure and accounting and legal and finance, like, there's just a lot of things that a lot of bustle that needs to be built, and frankly, a lot more hiring we need to do to be able to function as a publicly traded company. Um. But look, we're well on our way.

And if we continue to execute the way we have in the past four years for the next four I think that, um, you know, this would be a company that is beloved in the public markets. So now you're you're privately held, But are you break even? Are you cash flow positive at this point? Are you close to that or what? It's not a goal for us to be cash flow positive or break even right now. We're you know, seeing huge growth opportunities ahead of us who

were investing, you know, very aggressively into growth. Last year, we grew four and a half ax from the year before UM, and you know, we we believe that there's great opportunities not just in the US but all around the world to continue to put the pedal to the metal and grow faster. So that's what we're focused on right now. So what areas are you investing and are you is it products? Is it engineering, is it support, marketing? Everything? Yeah? Four,

I would say four man things. Number one, we're constantly investing in our team that acquires and then works with the talent on the platform. So talent acquisition is a really big part, and we're scaling that game up, especially with more vertical specialists now. So we're not just that even a year ago, people were just hired and they might one day talk to an athlete, the next day, talked to an actor, the next day, talk to a musician.

We're starting to hire people that are experts in different fields, that have really good networks, and and we're excited to build that team out. UM, you know, hiring all across the board. We're we're doing right now. We're investing deeply in research and development, you know, with rob post Um. You know, we think we can unlock some unbelievable engineers

that have worked on video at scale and money other platforms. UM. And then you know, I would say the last thing is marketing is something we haven't really done at all. We've spent very little money on marketing, but now we're we're really looking to start telling more people our story. Only four percent of the US population in our core demographic know who we are today, so thank you for helping tell our story. UM, But it's still early days. Right on the on the talent manager side of things,

are you uh finding it? Are you hiring people from traditional Hollywood agencies? We've hired people from a variety of backgrounds, some from traditional Hollywood backgrounds, but many from B two B sas companies like in tech and frankly, we've also hired a lot of people that we're doing other things but are just really passionate about pop culture celebrities and

had never worked with talent before. Especially a lot of the people we hired in Chicago, which is where the majority of our employees are, you know, C. A and W m E and you know Sony and MGM. They don't have like big offices. They're super rare if you're working with talent in a city like Chicago. But there's a lot of demand to do it, and we found just hiring smart people that are really passionate about what they're doing. Um, it didn't matter so much the experience,

especially in the early days, right. Uh, well, Stephen, were almost at a time. My last question for you is, uh, what cameos have you personally ordered and had event some of your favorite? Uh favorite ones? I've ordered hundreds over the last few years. But the best one I did recently it was a cameo I got for my mom for her birthday from Kenny Gime, favorite musician. He played a song for her. He talked about how, you know, special of a woman she must have been to to

create a son that created cameo. That's helped people become, um, you know, so much closer to the people that they loved the most. So that was special And my mom posted it on Facebook. It got six ninety two likes, which I think is the most like she's ever got. So she was with that. That is that is awesome. Stephen Glanis. Thank you so much, great to have you on the podcast, Thanks for having me, thanks for listening.

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